Cage out of Bookcase

One day I was driving through my neighborhood to come home. I saw this 3 story book case designed to be a Doll house. It was well loved but mostly sturdy. It was on the curb for bulk pickup. I put it in the back of my van and when I brought it inside I just knew that if I didn’t convert it to some boyish type of super hero hang out I would make it into a DIY cage for my hamsters.

Well, I did just that. My son disliked it as he already had a book case hero hang out. It was just much smaller and narrow but he still preferred it. And so, the DIY Bookcase cage was born for my two Roborovski hamsters.

The bottom portion of the 3 tiered case was not as sturdy as I’d like. One of the frames was cracked. We sawed the four stilts of the frame to get rid of that level and now it’s much more sound.

Roborovski hamsters are tiny hamsters who cannot get over the partition of that height. Unless an object is pushed up too close to the partition where they can gain some height to scramble over. So, be mindful of that when placing toys and food bowls inside this style set up.

I used self adhesive vinyl tiles to line the floor to wee proof it. This works wonderfully.

And I used self adhesive contact paper to the sides.

Then I used remaining vinyl tiles to make the partition and industrial strength velcro to attach it to the shelves for removal when doing deep cleans.

In the future I would like to convert these for Chinese hamsters. I would get acrylic sheets cut to size and hardware mesh and some sort of ventilation panels for the sides or back to develop an escape proof cage for that species as they are much more agile climbers and escape artists.